At the end of the holiday week there came a great change. On December 30th, 1916, Olga came to us excitedly and whispered: “Rasputin is missing!” His daughter had just telephoned Anna that he had not been home all night. This had alarmed Anna who had seen Rasputin just the previous evening, in Petrograd--for a few minutes only, in order to avoid further talk. Anna remembered that Rasputin had told her then that Prince Felix Youssoupoff was to call for him late in the evening to take him to his home to meet his wife, Irina. Mother was sure that our pretty cousin, Princess Irina, was in the Crimea and ill at that time. Irina was the daughter of Father’s sister, Xenia, and the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, the grandson of the Emperor Nicholas I, and Father’s favorite cousin and his brother-in-law. Olga and Tatiana left to attend to their work in the hospital as usual, while Marie and I reluctantly went to the schoolroom. After classes we joined the family and found, to our horror, that suspicion of Rasputin’s disappearance pointed not only to Prince Youssoupoff but to our own cousin, the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich. After a thorough investigation by the police, it was established that Rasputin had been murdered, his body wrapped in a military blanket and thrown into the Neva river in Petrograd. The frozen corpse was found two days later, under the ice. It was assumed that the body had been carried in a Red Cross car, then thrown into the river from the bridge. Inasmuch as a Red Cross conveyance had been involved, it came as a sickening shock to learn that the murder was linked to these two young men with the knowledge of the Commander of the Red Cross, Purishkevich, who was a member of the Duma. Several previous unsuccessful attempts on Rasputin’s life had been made. Once he was stabbed by a young woman in Siberia and another time deliberately run over by a carriage. Each time he had escaped serious injury. It was especially shocking to find Dimitri Pavlovich involved for, ever since he had been a young man, he had had a room in our home in Tsarskoe Selo and in the Crimea. His sister, Marie, had also spent many happy days with us. Aunt Ella had brought him up as her own son after his widowed father married a second time and left Russia for a while. Dimitri was considered a member of our family and we all were extremely fond of him. It was almost impossible for us to believe that he could be implicated in the murder of this much despised man. Later we heard that his role in the affair was very minor.